Martin Luther King, Jr (Right). Rosa Parks (Left).

Civil Rights Movement: 1955-1968
-When the U.S. outlawed racial discrimination, restored voting rights, and banned unequal access to public facilities or opportunities against blacks.

• During the colonial period, most colonies denied black suffrage
• In the 19th century, states outside of New England did not include black suffrage, even for free black men, in their constitutions
• Even when black suffrage was granted in the south, many states in the west and north still didn't give African Americans the right to vote
• The Civil Rights Movement had goals involving trying to make sure that African-Americans could vote
• Nation-wide attention was brought by the murder of three Civil Rights Activists during the "Freedom Summer" of 1964
• The 24th Amendment abolished the poll tax in 1964
• The Voting Rights Act of 1965 forbid the use of devices like literacy tests to deny the franchise to eligible voters and permitted the U.S. attorney general to send federal examiners to register voters in states where local officials were impeding registration. The result was a marked increased in black voter registration in the South.
• The Civil Rights Movement was the largest social movement of the 20th century in the U.S.
• Groups such as the Ku Klux Klan intimidated black voters by using violence
• White southern Democrats tried to deprive African Americans of voting rights by setting up poll tasxes, property qualifications, and complicating literacy tests
• In 1955, blacks in Montgomery, Alabama organized a protest of the policy of segregated seating of city buses by a boycott.  This was instigated by Rosa Parks who sat in the "white section" of the bus and refused to move.  The boycott lasted 381 days.
• Martin Luther King, Jr. was a local black minister who presided over the Southern Christian Leadership Conference
• President Lyndon Johnson maneuvered the Civil Rights Movement after the assassination of President Kennedy
• 1964- legislation outlawed segregation in public places and prohibited racial and gender discrimination in employment practices
• 1964- Freedom Summer hosted efforts to give African Americans voting rights
• 1965- President Johnson signed the Voting Rights Act
• 1968- Martin Luther King, Jr. was assassinated, and blacks began to have more rights. 
• Post-reconstruction period, racial segregation, disfranchisement, exploration, and violence
• The Civil Rights includes the ensuring of people's physical integrity, protection from discrimination from gender, religion, race, national origin, or age.